Recognized by The Directors Guild of America for its distinguished contribution to American culture, the Florida State University Film School is deploying a Euphonix/SAN solutions networked storage system. The system is designed to eliminate the problem of manually transporting large media files throughout the production facility to work on them. It will operate in a “direct-attached” configuration, meaning that all audio and video data will read and write to the storage in real time, just as if a local drive were connected to a workstation.
The facility features four ingest and finishing stations, two screening rooms, two dubbing rooms, an ADR station and a SFX station. Additionally, 12 sound-for-picture workstations and 15 additional laboratory workstations give instructors and students more capabilities. In producing up to 20 student productions and 250 student projects each academic year, the school needed an efficient media storage system to eliminate “sneaker-netting” files from station to station.
Central to the system is a 3TB Hitachi Data Systems TagmaStore AMS500 storage array, which interfaces the workstations via a 16-port Brocade Silkworm 4100 4GB Fiber Channel fabric or a Cisco 3750 Gig-E Ethernet switch, depending on the application’s bandwidth requirement. The Hitachi storage array provides two controller cards, each with dual ports, so there are four connections to the switch. This arrangement facilitates massive bandwidth, enabling HD video and high sample-rate audio to run concurrently throughout the system.
For more information, visit www.euphonix.com, www.sansolutions.com and http://filmschool.fsu.edu.
